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https://aethersnap.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/m/#respondSat, 12 May 2012 19:00:46 +0000http://aethersnap.wordpress.com/?p=63Like everything I have created, it was perfect. I flex my fingers, and the machine flexes with it, motions transcribed perfectly via the neural headset I’m wearing. “Wonderful. This will do nicely,” I say to the gaggle of assorted lab technicians.

The machine in question is an arm.

Not just any arm: next generation metallic prosthesis controlled by the human brain. With successful human testing, it would revolutionize the world, improving the lives of millions. This arm is perfection in metal on an already perfect concept. It hangs in a cage of wires, the hand clenching and unclenching, mirroring my actions. At first glance, it would be indistinguishable from a normal human arm, if you ignored the silvery metal skin, traced with copper circuitry.

The lab techs burst out into a smattering of polite applause, and I see that a group at the back is dangerously close to champagne. I get the image, just briefly, of me ruling over them with a literal iron fist. It’s not a bad image.

I strip the headset off and replace it on its pedestal. The arm convulses briefly with the severing of the neural link and falls limp. “How long until this will be ready for larger-scale testing?” I ask the nearest tech.

He gulps and stammers out, “Uh, I think that it will be about six months until we can start human testing. Of course, there’re a lot of contingencies that we need to work out, and there’s no telling what would happen once we have the prototype brain implant working with the arm. We’ve only tested it with the headset, so that throws in some extra variables that we haven’t quite tested yet.” His arms are gesturing wildly as he’s talking in a vain attempt at trying to cover up his fevered nervousness.

“Can we speed that up to… say, two weeks from now?” I ask. Silence falls on the assembled technicians as they try to come up with a decent answer. The tech I had singled out shoots an angry look at his colleagues and says, “I guess that you could have it working in two weeks, but it’s really risky to go straight to human testing at this point.”

“I am aware of the risks. I designed the thing,” I say. “Call the surgery team, and tell them to get the operating room ready. Schedule it for the Wednesday after next.” The tech’s eyes widen and he starts quivering.

“But who are you planning on attaching the arm to?” he says. I can see that he already knows the answer.

I smile an empty smile and say, “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for our work.” The phone rings. The tech takes advantage of this and scampers off, and the rest of the group dissipates to their own projects.

I pick up the phone and listen intently. It’s the security guard at the entrance, letting me know that there’s a visitor in my office waiting for me. He wouldn’t have let him in, but the stranger insisted that he knew me.

Undoubtedly it was another bureaucrat, trying to work through more legal red tape. The project was, as innovative projects generally are, a wholly controversial one. Naturally the government waited until the innovation was right in their laps before working out the legal fineries.

The intruder is not, as I suspected, a bureaucrat. The intruder is someone equally as unwelcome.

“Hello,” he says. That one simple word hangs in the air, unwanted. Already I’m regretting answering that phone; this is merely one more distraction to deal with. I shut the door behind me with a click and cross to my chair. I could feel his eyes boring into me, but I ignore them. I ignore him.

His voice hasn’t changed, of course. It has the same musical cadence, the same cheerfulness that grates on my nerves every time he opens his lips. He’s sprawled on one of the visitor chairs. What pisses me off most of all is the awful casualness: his legs crossed with a cup of coffee in one hand. Peace in blue jeans. I’m not sure who even let him into the building, but someone was getting written up for this.

“What do you want, Elias?” I ask, finally. I don’t look at him. His face brings back memories, and memories are the last thing that I want to deal with at this point.

He coughs, testing the waters before he dives in, and says, “I wanted to see how you were doing, Matthew. It’s been a while.” My hands clench on the polished wood of the chair’s armrests.

I turn in my chair abruptly, and stare hard at him. “A while? You’d consider six years to be just ‘a while’?” I let the steel bleed through my voice, and I can almost hear him wince. He shuffles around in his chair, leaning forward.

“The church has been keeping me busy. Plus, every time I do call you, you don’t pick up. I needed to come down and see you in person,” he says. The armrests are about to splinter. I say nothing. I say nothing.

He squirms a bit, the words suddenly broken. “I see you on the news, M. Almost every day. You’ve been making headlines everywhere,” he says. He keeps his voice low, and doesn’t look at me. His face relaxes, the worry wrinkles smoothed into invisibility, and he lets out a dry chuckle. “Just think, my brother, the super-scientist. Writing papers and changing the world.” Our eyes lock.

I’m elsewhere, far away and long ago. This particular memory was always sharper than the reality. My father liked to take us out to here, when the bustle of city life got too much for him. We’d pack up the car and drive to the place where chaos and calm collided. Elias would yell, and the two of them would rush off into the water, screaming with joy. My time was spent looking at the waterfall.

The waterfall seemed to overpower everything else in the clearing. The large pool at the base, ringed with trees, paled in comparison to the waterfall’s presence. I always sat in the trees, staring up at the water as it bounded downwards toward earth. There was something that captured my imagination in those drops. It was almost as if the very seeds of change were contained within the water. No two drops were the same, no two drops were repeated.

Elias shouts for me. “Come on, M! You’re missing out!” He’s hoisted on my father’s shoulders, laughing his head off, his fingers tangled in my father’s curly black hair. My father drops him and he plunges flailing into the water with a splash of laughter. I shimmy down the tree, my bare feet hitting bare earth, and I’m off, colliding into them in a tangle of dirt, limbs and water.

I’ve been back to the waterfall since then, when I needed to clear my head. It hasn’t changed, and yet something is missing.

He’s staring at me now. The memory fades into nothingness. Neither of us is really willing to say anything to the other. I busied myself by staring at anything at all: the lines of books on the shelves, the degrees and certificates on the walls, anything but him. My brother.

“Did the church put you up to this?” The worlds leave my mouth before I can stop them. Damn. The old paranoia rears its ugly head once again. I attempt to look apologetic, but I can tell that it doesn’t help at all.

He’s hurt by that question. He has every right to be. Pain shines in his eyes; the first victim of my steel. “The church…” he takes a deep breath. “They had nothing to do with this. Sure, they’ve had heated discussions about the… ethics of your augmentation projects, but I’ve stayed out of that. Coming here today was all on me. My decision.” His hands thread and unthread themselves on his lap.

“I wish I could say that you made the right choice,” I said. “Coming here after—what, ten years of being gone?—and expecting me to pick up a conversation with you as if it never happened? What were you thinking?” Gunshots strike plywood, one question after another.

He didn’t back down, of course. Submission was not in his nature. The pain that lurked only seconds ago was replaced by anger, pure and clean. “I couldn’t stay, M. There were things that I needed to do to take care of myself. Things that you, that Dad, couldn’t provide. I had to find myself, and I apparently did that a little bit differently than you.” He reaches over the desk and jabs a finger into my lab coat. “You couldn’t find yourself if you tried.”

That stung. My mouth works and my brain desperately tries to find some form of a response. “I have found myself! Here…” I gesture vaguely around at the office, with all of its fineries. He’s not impressed.

“I wanted to believe that you were different, M. That you weren’t the same as you were on the TV, giving interviews and making speeches.” He sighs and shakes his head. “You’re not the same kid I remember. You’ve changed.” He stands and gives me one last long piercing look.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t had left!” I blurt out. All semblance of cool detachment flies out the window with that, but the needling was too much. I’m standing now, and we’re locked eye to eye. He’s taller, he has the advantage, but I refuse to give him any ground.

He laughs. The derision in that laugh has an oily feeling that makes my skin crawl. “You think this is my fault? Is that what you tell yourself to make your life bearable?” His voice took on a mocking edge. “Oh man, my lonely existence would be so much better if my brother hadn’t left! Grow up, Matthew. I was seventeen. You can’t have expected me to stick around forever. Besides, you had Cate, and you had Dad.”

I didn’t have Cate, not anymore. Her photograph was in the bottom drawer of my desk. I take it out every once in a while to look at it, but nothing more. I didn’t feel like mentioning that to him. It would be one more rock of truth to add to his mountain.

“That’s the difference between you and me,” he says. He’s quivering with anger, his brown eyes fierce. “I just wanted to find God; you want to be God. You want to change the world, no matter the cost. How can you do that when you can’t even help yourself? I hope you’re pleased with what you’ve become.”

He turns and puts one hand on the door. I scream inwardly at myself to say something, anything to make him stop. I just needed to say anything to justify myself, anything to prevent him from walking out that door. “Goodbye, Matthew. God be with you.” I say nothing, and he was gone.

The anger that kept me upright disappears and I collapse in my chair. In its absence, I feel nothing but weariness. My thoughts return to my old place of solace, the waterfall, once again. I used to have a fantasy that the three of us, Dad, Elias and I, would go to that waterfall and never leave. It was comforting, as fantasies usually are, but even as a child I knew it was unrealistic. I grew up, and the fantasy faded. Elias found peace, and I found silence.

The office suddenly felt claustrophobic with his absence, and I struggled to breathe. Elias’s words didn’t hurt me; what did was their inherent truth. I couldn’t deny that. For the first time in years, I had to admit that I was utterly terrified. Of him, of what I was about to do, and most of all, of me. I pick up the phone and dialed the operating team.

“Call it off. The future can wait.” I stood. Without another word, I chased after my brother. There were more important risks to take.

]]>https://aethersnap.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/m/feed/0aethersnapNot Writing What You Knowhttps://aethersnap.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/not-writing-what-you-know/
https://aethersnap.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/not-writing-what-you-know/#respondFri, 30 Mar 2012 22:45:50 +0000http://aethersnap.wordpress.com/?p=59Since I’ve taken the last couple weeks or so to horrendously procrastinate on writing anything of decent value—besides a short story I wrote that will be published in April—I’ve managed to spend a lot of time doing nothing at all every day of the week. In that time, I’ve given a lot of thought to the actual concept of writing and how it’s actually done. I managed to sit my behind down in my computer chair and plot out and rewrite a sizable excerpt of a novel that I had (mostly) finished during NaNoWriMo. Naturally, and crushingly, I still wasn’t pleased with it, despite reassurances of the contrary regarding it and the other short story by authors and other students alike, but this seems to be a trend in artistic endeavors.

So I’ve tabled that, barring the revision statement I have to do regarding it for my creative writing class (which I am also procrastinating on so hard). I just couldn’t get the words to flow together well, the world to seem convincing and non-derivative, and the characters from being mishmashes of personality flaws that I’ve pulled out of a hat. It’s an extremely scary thing seeing a character you’ve created and feeling absolutely fucking nothing about her suffering.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading about writing, taking classes about writing, writing strange metanarratives about writing like the one you’re currently feasting your eyes on. Since I’m on the fast track of an English degree, I’ve probably spent more time doing the former three instead of doing something actually interesting, like writing about space pirates. But from all of the classes and essays I’ve taken and read, the most important piece of advice I’ve received either directly or indirectly from authors and teachers is thus:

WRITE THINGS

An average day for me consists of going to school for a while, working a bit and then going home and browsing the internet until I play Dota 2 for seventeen hours. Pants are optional at that point, but that’s hardly relevant. What is relevant is that not ONE SINGLE PART of that daily routine consists of me putting virtual pen to screen paper and scribbling out some nonsense. Hell, it doesn’t even consists of me playing the stacks of unplayed video games I have lying around, which will be oh so crucial if I actually decide to become a games journalist like I keep telling myself I will be. I think part of it is some form of twisted self-loathing; my writing doesn’t match up to the writing of the many talented journalists that I follow, the novels I browse and the short stories I eat.

Rationally, I know this is stupid. I’m not sure what sort of convoluted idealism I picked up when I was a kid that made me expect my first drafts of everything is the equivalent of me shitting diamonds, but that’s how it is. And I think what I need to do is, instead of insulating myself in my bubble of isolation, is actually try: pitch things to gaming sites, write some short stories, figure out how editing works. I can’t be John Green, Tolkien or Dave Eggers right off the bat. I just need to figure out something I can write. All of my teachers, in addition to the first main point, also dumped this phrase on me:

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

And its more expanded, more apt cousin:

WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW

That phrase is bullshit. Both of those phrases are bullshit. What I know is not interesting at all, why would I want to write about it? Sure, I have an understanding of things some people won’t (which is interesting, I guess), like the transhumanism kick I’ve been on for the last month or so. I’m not an interesting person, from a homogeny viewpoint; I’m a white, 18-year-old cisgendered male who’s slightly queer but not distressingly so. I’m not a diversity hire, I haven’t come from poverty, for all intents and purposes, I am well-adjusted.

Because of that, I’d readily accept the fact that I don’t know anything. Sure, I know enough about Magic: the Gathering to talk someone’s ear off about it, but where will that get me with writing fiction? Where would that get me with writing about games? I see authors who readily post extremely interesting things about video games, thought-provoking, insightful essays about literary theory and other things. I wrote two essays about the basics and then I stuck my head in the sand, overwhelmed by stress and the force of my own expectations. The dirt is still marked with the shuffling of my uncomfortable feet.

Fantasy and science fiction focuses on negative emotions a lot, despite the inherent idealism of both genres. It’s probably just a symbol of the times, disillusionment with idealism and an overall sense of pessimism, but a lot of fantasy works rely on fear, anger and sadness to drive the plot. Strife drives plots, not peace.

I don’t know fear. I’ve never had to feel the fear of being afraid to step out of your house because of life-threatening, dangerous fear. I’ve never had to feel the fear taking me over until there is nothing left except the fear, nothing left and nothing matters. Fate has been kind to me, and has granted me that particular mercy. But I’m still driven by some twisted desire, like a thrill-seeker; that quietly, insidiously rational part of my brain saying that I will never convincingly write someone else’s fear until I’ve experienced it.

I don’t know anger. I’ve felt the occasional bursts of righteous fury, when the injustice was too great to be complicit in silence. But I’ve never felt the kind of anger that defines most novel protagonists, the kind that channels that anger into the strength of character needed to kill or defeat the object of that anger. I’ve never felt that anger, but I imagine I will, some day in the future.

I don’t know sadness. Perhaps I’ve been blessed in this regard. I didn’t have to experience the depression that seems oh so crushingly common in today’s society. I take my occasional melancholy and the bursts of dysphoria as much preferable to the hellish nature of depression. But how am I supposed to write about someone’s depression if I’ve never felt it for myself?

If I can think of one thing that I’ve learned from introspection (emo rock and Dota 2) is that this is the goddamn stupidest thing ever. So tear down the idea of writing what you know, because it’s rubbish. It’s impossible. You can’t write about the seventeen moons of Te’thorisht and its four-legged beasts that feed off the hunger of others because it’s inherently impossible to know them. Here’s an alternative distilled writing catch-phrase.

WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND

It’s as simple as that. Being a stereotypical introverted nerd shut-in (not really but okay), I crave understanding. I want to know people! I want to understand them! I can’t write characters by tossing traits into a blender and hoping a cohesive person comes out of it in the end. I want to meet people, I want to know their joys, their hurts, what they take pride in. I want to create people, see their personalities unfurl across pages and time. I want to understand.

Being a self-loathing ass won’t help me improve, both in my writing and in my relationships with others. Understanding concepts, games, people, characters: that, beyond all else, is the key.

STOP: If you’ve been a hermit or a cave-dweller for the last four months, you might not want to read this article. I’m going to spoil some stuff about the main quest for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Morrowind, and maybe some other things. I don’t know. But if you want to go out and play those games before I start rampaging all over their stories, that’s fine by me. I’m patient.

Skyrim was something of a big deal, wasn’t it? A trailer was released, and the Internet collectively weed itself like it generally does. People ask each other if they’ve seen the trailer for six months afterwards and nag their closest friends about it. “Hey, have you seen that Skyrim trailer? It comes out in NINE MONTHS. I can’t contain my excitement!” People booked vacation time for this thing. Finally, the game comes out and to the utter surprise of no one, Bethesda needs to buy another trophy cabinet to hold their Game of the Year awards.

The repeated praise that Skyrim gets is unsurprising, though, because it’s genuinely good. Maybe you’ve played it and liked it! Maybe you’ve played it and became one of the vocal minorities that thinks that Skyrim is the worst thing ever. While I certainly had my fun with Skyrim’s world and story, I’m going to say something that also might not surprise anyone:

Skyrim told its story in possibly the most rubbish way possible.

Alright, I’m going to say something controversial and I’m going to say it in bold, heading text so that you know it’s important. Ready? Here goes.

WRITERS ARE AFRAID OF LETTING READERS TAKE LIBERTIES

Wow, that sounds important. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a professional writer. I’ve never been paid to write. But I’ve made enough educated guesses to say with fair certainty that writers want their readers to experience as much of the story as possible. They don’t want you to miss anything because it’s their story and they’re telling it. With books, it’s a safe bet that you would experience as much as possible because it’s presented in a linear fashion. There’s no risk involved because the only expectation on you is to simply read (and hopefully understand) the story. You experience it secondhand from the author herself. The reader doesn’t need to take liberties with the story because they can’t take liberties with it, besides interpreting symbols and the like.

With video games, it’s a whole different experience. Suddenly, it’s not the author or authors telling the story; the expectation is on you to discover it for yourself. What this means for the writer is that large stretches of the game are seen as unimportant. Subplots become side-quests which become optional. Or, the converse happens (like in Skyrim’s case) where the main story is seen as optional compared to the side-quests.

The game developers then incentivize exposition and story by adding rewards to them. In a book, if it goes deeper into the motivations of the characters, that’s a major bonus for you simply because it’s more story. The author’s discussing a character you already (hopefully) like, or making an unlikeable character more likeable, or both, or neither! In a video game, if the quest doesn’t have a decent reward attached to the end of it, you can bet your ass that no one who plays the game would do that particular side-quest, regardless of how much juicy exposition they get from it. Players want to discover things in these worlds, but they don’t want to be roped into doing tasks if there isn’t a good reason for it.

If you’ve even heard of Skyrim, you might be familiar with the Unusual Stones: pink, floating diamond-shaped crystals that never left your inventory for any reason because they’re quest related. These stones were attached to a side-quest related to the Crown of Barenziah, a headdress worn by a prominent character in Morrowind’s Tribunal expansion pack. Having played the first six hours of Morrowind about four times, my elven ears perked at this information. After I looked up the quest online and found out what the reward for finding all 24 stones was (a perk that allowed you to find gems more often in chests), I dropped the quest right there. Sixteen stones will never leave my inventory. It just wasn’t worth the amount of time for that little of a reward.

I touched on it a little bit in the last essay, but it’s worth going deeper into it now. Skyrim is terrified of you. It’s afraid that anything you do in the game that could possibly endanger the rest of the story. What Bethesda did to rectify this issue is simple: they made everything separate. Even things that would technically have far-reaching consequences, like killing the Emperor at the end of the Dark Brotherhood questline, have no narrative significance in the grand scheme of things. You killed Alduin and saved Skyrim? Good for you! There are still dragons everywhere, though!

The massive amounts of choices that are presented to you in Skyrim still exist and are still legitimate despite this. However, because the effects of your choices have no bearing in the overall scope of the narrative, the choices are merely illusions. Skyrim has six complete questlines, including the main quest. None of them influence each other in any way. None of them overlap. None of them even recognize that the others have even occurred. You would think that the aforementioned assassination of the Emperor would have some impact on the events that happen in the Civil War questline, but it’s glossed over and largely ignored.

This is a trend that I’ve noticed in recent years: as games start to become more “accessible” and “mainstream,” the player’s influence in the story of the game decreases. Games that continue to be considered to be the pinnacles of story-telling in a digital medium, like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment and similar RPGs are all over a decade old at this point.

What’s even stranger about this is that Skyrim’s predecessor, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, did this rather well for the most part. You could still conceivably do everything and see everything in a single play-through, if you had the patience. The one major diff’erence is it lacks the hand-holding that Skyrim does with its nonsense about essential NPCs. You killed Caius right at the beginning of Morrowind? Tough luck, you can find Sunder and Keening by yourself. That’ll teach you to murder people indiscriminately. What Morrowind did with its story structure was extremely brave, and Skyrim has sadly retreated from that for a more conservative story-telling system.

Skyrim wants its players to experience everything. It needs you to experience everything. Because of this, it lays all of its cards out on the table right away for the player. Everything is available from the beginning, no matter what background you are, no matter what skills you’ve chosen, no matter what backstory you’ve invented for yourself. This, of course, leads to some odd contradictions. Inevitably you become the spell-slinging, sword-wielding Archmage, hero, leader of the Companions, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, and any other guild or organization that would give you some coins and a marker in your quest book.

This is boring. Don’t do this. I love Skyrim, despite its awful narrative structure, but it’s a horrible way to structure a world. I can see it being done in an MMO, where everything has to be static simply because of the amount of players that need to experience the same content in the same areas, but in a single-player, offline RPG it’s simply unacceptable. It’s the main reason I stopped playing Skyrim in the first place; I couldn’t be arsed to troop through the unfinished questlines for some simple Steam achievements.

Skyrim isn’t the only one to fall prey to this, of course. However, because of its status as the current media darling, it seems to have gotten a free ride to Perfection-Land simply because games journalists were dazzled by its qualities. I know I was; I turned in a rather sickeningly praising review of it just a couple months ago. Its qualities shine bright, sure, but that doesn’t mean that we should ignore its faults simply because it does a lot of stuff decently.

INFINITE, SHIMMERING POSSIBILITIES

Bioware gets it. At least, they’re one of the few studios still around nowadays that truly get that the whole point of a videogame is the interactivity of it. If I wanted to read a story, I’d grab a book off this shelf next to me. I’ve got hundreds. But if I wanted to experience a story, to influence it, there are video games for that.

I didn’t play Dragon Age II because I hated the demo, so let’s talk about Mass Effect 2. Now, I hated the story of Mass Effect 2, despite having never played the first one. It just wasn’t a terribly good story (being simply a bunch of side-quests linked together under the Collectors umbrella. There were only two actual main quests in the game), so I was understandably baffled when it started collecting Best Writing awards.

But what Mass Effect 2 did insanely well was the amount of influence the player had on the story. The loyalty missions, which were completely exposition in themselves, were tailor made to be optional but necessary. They had the intrinsic reward of learning more about the characters, and the always-useful extrinsic reward of your character not biting the dust in the suicide mission. Those were the only rewards for finishing each loyalty mission; you didn’t get a new gun, or a new pair of boots. All you have is some extra background info and the promise of maybe not dying in the future.

Mass Effect 2 was not an open world by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn’t benefit (and suffer) from the sheer scope of Skyrim. But it still dared to have its players live by and deal with the consequences of their actions through different endings. Garrus got carried away by bees in my playthrough. Was that my fault? YES. Does that define my experience with the game in any way? YES. People still look at me funny when I mention that three of my squad died on the final mission.

Of course, the choice isn’t the only part of the narrative that Mass Effect 2 had going for it, and the weakness of its overarching plot due to being the middle child in that series did bring it down. But the involvement of the player in the story did mark it as something quite special in my mind, as that degree of choice is almost unheard of in contemporary role-playing games. Player choice is a wholly underrated concept in this industry, when making highly-linear shooters makes the big bucks and powerful classically-styled RPGs are just starting to make a comeback in the mainstream market.

HOW I’D IMPROVE THE COLLEGE OF WINTERHOLD

I don’t doubt that Skyrim has an almost absurd amount of words sunk into it. I imagine that they could fill several books. While it would be an immense amount of work, think of how much more interesting each individual questline would be if the player was given a bit more leeway throughout! I’ve sketched up some possible endings for the College of Winterhold questline, instead of it being rigidly plotted to its end. Of course, most of these endings depend on doing away with the idea of “Essential NPCs.”

Ancano is killed by the player before challenging him in “Eye of Magnus.” This would only be able to be accomplished before he seals himself in with the Eye. Because of his status as Mage of the College, the player (if discovered) would be kicked from the College and a bounty would be leveraged in Winterhold. Since his plot would have never be discovered, the Eye would remain floating in the center of the College, or it would be taken by the Psijic Order.

The Arch Mage is killed by the player before he is supposed to die in the normal questline. If the player isn’t discovered, Ancano makes his move right there, and the questline continues as normal. If the player is discovered you can:

Start a coup by intimidating Tolfdir into making you Archmage. A battle will occur between the player and several randomly-picked mages. Once this rebellion is quelled, the player is made Archmage at the expense of the chosen high-profile mages dying, leaving the College without trainers for several random schools. Ancano activates the Eye of Magnus, and the questline continues, aside from the fact that many of the mages of the college only begrudgingly follow you. This could influence the main quest as well, as the College librarian would be less likely to give you relevant info on the Elder Scroll.

Decide to take responsibility and accept a punishment. The player is permanently kicked out of the College of Winterhold, and the guards in Winterhold attack on site. This will understandably make getting the Elder Scroll harder later in the game. That’s your own fault. Ancano is elected Archmage, he takes control of the Eye of Magnus. It is destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion, and most of the College members are killed. Half of Winterhold is wiped off the map.

Beat Ancano to the punch by activating the Eye of Magnus yourself. This could either spiral off into another questline involving the player having to deal with the Psijic Order, or simply give the player some buffs and debuffs (like making your magical powers supercharged, at the expense of it burning health whenever you cast spells).

Now, doesn’t that sound more exciting than the normal quest -> quest -> quest -> “you win, here’s some clothes” system that Skyrim usually fell back on? It doesn’t force the story through by sheer narrative gumption. It simply gives you a little bit of leeway to actually define your own story.

Game developers seem to be forgetting that video games aren’t simply a fancy soapbox to tell stories from. It’s a platform for which you, the player, can define your own stories. It’s the medium we love, the one that forces us to point excitedly at the screen and yell, “Holy shit! Did you see that? Did you see what I did?” This ability to choose, this unique feature to our video games, is what sets gaming apart from static media like movies. Our stories are constantly in flux.

I’m not sure how much exposure this essay will receive compared to the last one (and major thanks to Mr. Rossignol, I was chuffed to see my words in the Sunday Papers. Dream part one accomplished?) but I would be extremely pleased to talk with some actual games writers about this. If you are a games writer or know someone who writes video game narratives, please have yourself/them read this and drop me an email at tjinks[at]gmail[dot]com. Also, thanks for the lovely comments I received on the last essay, your delicious pageviews only serve to make me stronger (and my writing better, hopefully).

Adam Jensen is shaking down a woman for her life’s work. I chose this option, but I didn’t want it. Upon setting out on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I had only a couple ideas on how I was going to play his character. One: each action would be ultimately decided by logic, and two: If the situation calls for either anger or empathy, it should be as detached as possible. But when screen-Jensen goes from almost allowing the woman to cry on his shoulder to appearing to want to break her spine over his knee, I can’t help but feel that my initial goals were going to die unrealized.

For as much as a role-playing game Human Revolution is, it’s difficult to truly play it as a role-playing game. Every bit of dialogue that grates with my ideal is jarring, and snaps me back out of the magical game-world where player and character are the same. I found myself dreading dialogue options: Would choosing this option make Jensen look like some faceless arm of a crime syndicate instead of a person who merely weighs options to find the most logical one? Should I find a bag of puppies for him to oppress?

The problem is that Jensen is not me. He can’t be the character I envision in my head, no matter how much I try. He is his own character, an entity wholly separate from me. I am just the invisible hand telling him which baddies to shoot and what to say in conversation.

Strong, relatable protagonists are the gold standard in writing. If you’re writing a book, a short story, whatever, you want a character that can exist in the world you’re writing and be both realistic and interesting. Stories can rise and fall based on the strength of their characters, and people will get pissed if characters don’t live up to their potential. But this advice is good if you’re writing a novel. It doesn’t have any place in narratives of video games, so you should toss it out. Forget it, it’s not important.

What is important is the idea of a player character and a player avatar. There’s only one fundamental difference between the two concepts: the character. The player character has enough character and history to stand on her own outside of your, the player’s, influence. This has parallels between the concepts of a traditional strong protagonist, which I’ll get into in a minute. The player avatar, on the other hand, has no meaning outside of what you put into it. It cannot exist in a vacuum, unlike the player character.

PLAYER AVATAR AS A CONSTRUCT

I’ve played an uncomfortable amount of Skyrim. My character, a Khajiit shadowmage, was my companion throughout the fifty-so hours of trekking through Skyrim’s frozen tundras. But without me, the character is meaningless. He’s only tangentially related to the plot, and that’s only because the player is the most important person in the game. He can’t exist outside of my influence, he has no personality, no skills besides what I’ve chosen. I am him and he is I. That’s as simple as it gets.

This is the idea of a player avatar.

The player avatar is nothing without the player. Without you, the avatar cannot exist. The avatar works in a narrative sense by allowing you to insert yourself in the story of the game without breaking the flow. The avatar allows you to shroud yourself in the trappings of the chosen hero and coexist with the game’s world, peacefully and without conflict. I hate the word “immersive” because it’s so wishy-washy, but it’s the only word that truly fits here. When the player can insert herself into the game proper, the player feels more included. This makes it easier on the writers of the game as well: they don’t have to write a discrete protagonist character. All they have to do is account for what the player can and will do.

Dungeons and Dragons is completely based off of the idea of players as avatars. In my mind, it’s the ideal of role-playing games. The game doesn’t need to account for the player because it’s built around the player, that’s the entire role of the Dungeon Master. It’s an extremely powerful system because the players can create their characters however they please. To a video game, a drow ranger is a drow ranger is a drow ranger. To the player of table-top games, that drow ranger isn’t just any drow ranger. He’s the ranger who acts too fast and angers too quickly; the one who is just as skilled with the bow as he is with his fists.

That’s not to say that role-playing of this magnitude is quite as deep in a video game, far from it. The role playing servers on most MMOs are a testament to that. But there are several limitations that are in place in most RPGs simply because it’s impossible to account for everything the player can toss out of his mind. The game cannot implement your invented backstories, because to the game they don’t exist. The game cannot account for every single one of your actions through speech and dialogue, and the game can’t account for the chaotic nature of people.

To combat this, most of the RPGs I’ve seen invent something relevant to the plot immediately before the plot happens to insert the protagonist in. MMOs have the tutorial grounds before the player is dumped onto the full world. The Elder Scrolls games have some version of prison boat/cart/cell/spacecar that the protagonist starts out on. In a rather daring version, Fallout 3 traces throughout the player’s life before it reaches that magical moment when tutorial ends and plot begins. But what these games have in common is that what happens before that pivotal moment doesn’t matter one bit for the actual plot. Everything you make up to lead up to that scene is useless, from the game’s perspective.

The one major stumbling I can find with using an avatar in games is when the game tries to incorporate you into the plot too much. Skyrim drops you up on one of its mountains and yells about how you can do anything! The game tries to pressure you into experiencing as much as possible on the first run-through that it’s terrified of having even the slightest moment where the player isn’t extremely involved in everything. Everything in Skyrim is about your avatar, but the avatar doesn’t exist. It’s just a construct of you.

PLAYER CHARACTER AS A ROLE

Screen-Jensen is talking again. The words that he’s saying and the words that are running through my imagination zig-zag past each other drunkenly; sometimes they meet in perfect harmony, sometimes they occupy different sections of the universe. This is unsurprising to me; this Jensen and my ideal Jensen are mutually incompatible. Jensen, then, is the player character.

The player character has no relation to you at all, and is just the character the player happens to be controlling at the time.

Now, I’m anticipating your complaints, friends. You’re wondering why someone would choose to put a character into a role-playing game when an avatar would give you more power. While it’s true that role-playing games that feature a character as the protagonist are significantly more restrictive than games like Dungeons of Dragons, you’re still playing a role in these role-playing games. It’s simply a role with a character attached to it.

This lack of player control over the character could be a gigantic detriment to you, but it also is a major boon to the legion of writers who slave over the game’s narrative. Narratives that focus on avatars generally can’t have any relation to a protagonist’s backstory besides extremely general information and events that happened in earlier games. Once you give a protagonist some depth, well dang, you now have the ability to work backwards in addition to working forwards.

Look at it this way. In Elder Scrolls V, every single character you will ever meet over the course of the game is a stranger. All of the NPCs are introduced over the course of the game, and they start out with no relationship to your character whatsoever. But when you take a game like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and give the protagonist some history, suddenly everything has more narrative significance. The generic quest-giver turns into the bereaved mother of Jensen’s girlfriend, the person you harass mid-quest becomes Jensen’s ex-partner.

It, quite simply, gives the plot a little bit more weight in ways video games only can. For as much as I loved Skyrim and its story, I couldn’t find it quite as relatable on a personal, character level. In Human Revolution, I’m infatuated with the story and its characters, simply because Jensen is an interesting character in an interesting setting. It’s not a terribly powerful way to structure a character gameplay-wise, as evidenced by my issues with its dialogue system, but it certainly works, and works well.

COLUMN A, MEET COLUMN B

I’m loath to say that these are the be-all, end-all way to structure an RPG protagonist. Like so, so many other things in life, the ideas I’ve put forth operate on a spectrum. Because of this, there exists protagonists that would fall somewhere in the middle between avatar and character.

The eminent Commander Shepard from the rabidly popular Mass Effect franchise tends to cool her feet solidly in the middle. She has a solid past, but it’s immaterial and usually not brought up within the narrative proper. Additionally, you can customize the name and face of Shepard in true avatar fashion. (Because of video game restrictions, of course, no one will ever comment on your name and face. I’ve seen some truly horrifying Shepards that the in-game people wouldn’t bat an eye at. Yikes.) While she has these avatar-ish qualities, she displays the level of emotion that would generally be attributed to a character. It’s also worth noting games like Bioware’s older games (Baldur’s Gate) and the more recent Dragon Age: Origins as exceptions to the ideas I’ve talked about in the avatar section above. Both games star the player as an avatar, but have heavy backstory elements attributed to them. They don’t run truly contrary to that idea of a true avatar (where the player is in complete control of the character), but they are characters without faces assigned by the game proper. If you imagine a line, Elder Scrolls and most MMOs would be solidly on the left side cooling their toes in the avatar camp. Dragon Age: Origins would sit comfortably in between the midpoint and the avatar side, with Mass Effect in the middle and Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the far right.

It’s not uncommon for a shift along the spectrum to happen within a game series as well. I’m bringing up Deus Ex again because man, I love Deus Ex. It’s also an extremely important game from a narrative perspective, but for the purposes of this post, I’m just looking at the characteristics JC Denton and Adam Jensen. For all of its high points, JC Denton wasn’t a terribly strong character. Instead, to me, he felt like more of a mould than a character, and because of it I didn’t have any of the problems with projecting myself onto him like I did with Jensen. His backstory was lightly detailed and his character was significantly more influenced by the player’s actions rather than the rigidity of a narrative.

When writing a gaming narrative, it’s important to ask several questions to yourself. The most important of these is: How much do you want to include the player in the game’s narrative? Is telling a story more important than giving control to the players? Do you want the game itself to tell the story, or do you want the characters to do it?

This is the first essay in a series of essays I’ll be writing that critically analyze the structure of role-playing game narratives. The second will come next Friday and will deal with the illusion of choice. Exciting stuff!